Thursday, December 29, 2011

Collabnet Subversion Edge

I have been quite fond of VisualSVN Server on Windows, since it was an easy way to setup subversion with a nice means to administer repositories and users.

As of lately, I grew tired because of the way they mangled apache, subversion, python and trac together. While searching for an alternative I found out that Collabnet offers exactly what I need: Apache bundled with Subversion, Python and other stuff. Very nice! This bundle is called Subversion Edge.

I decided to take the plunge and update the production VisualSVN server. After all: How hard can it be?

The installation went fine, and the collabnet subversion edge web-interface greeted me.
I had tweaked the configuration of VisualSVN server to allow single-sign-on with SSPI, so I naturally wanted to copy the relevant parts of the config. Once one tinkers with the config files, the web-interface can no longer be used to make changes to those parts. That's fine by me.

After this was taken care of I fired up Collabnet's Apache service and started to dump my subversion repositories one by one. Instead of manually loading them with svnadmin, the web interface of subversion edge provides takes care of that. Simply point it to the dump file and go ahead. That was easy!

Setting up the server, finetuning apache and migrating my three repositories took less than one hour! ;-)